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Allen Craig outrighted off 40 man roster
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Post by stevedillard on May 19, 2015 7:59:38 GMT -5
I think the better question is whether the Sox trade deadline goals of major league talent rather than prospects was the way to go. I know many of us were hoping Lester, Lackey and Miller would yield top prospects.
Miller did, and that seems to be a winning trade. Lester got us Cespedes, and fortunately they were able to convert his one year deal into Porcello. Question whether a prospect for Lester could have been flipped.
The Lackey trade also could have been done for prospects, but Ben said they wanted immediate help. Personally I would have gone with a different philosophy, regardless of the Kelly/Craig result.
That Craig flames out is just further reason to second guess Ben.
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Post by elguapo on May 19, 2015 8:24:33 GMT -5
Craig's results pre-trade were not appealing without some indication that he had a fixable mechical/physical problem. For some reason he was a persistent target for the Sox, presumably based on their scouting, and they finally landed him. Has there ever been an explanation stated of what they thought they were getting, what they thought was wrong?
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Post by James Dunne on May 19, 2015 9:34:47 GMT -5
Also... maybe the team just didn't want to deal with a sulking, surly John Lackey POed about pitching for the league minimum. I'm getting a bit tired of repeating this, but if that was such a big deal, they could have just extended it to something like 2y/$12m which would have been eminently reasonable for both sides. You're assuming that Lackey was amenable to a reasonable extension. I've been a pretty big critic of this trade since the beginning, but if the Red Sox felt they needed to move Lackey, and this was the best offer? I dunno. Lackey would also have gained 10-5 rights following the season, so the team would've had less leverage in trading him. There were a lot of considerations going on here.
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Post by DesignatedForAssignment on May 19, 2015 9:38:14 GMT -5
I do not believe that anyone has noted: Craig was waived and outrighted before he had spent 20 days on option. So he does not burn an option and, at this point, goes into 2016 with 2 options remaining. A trivial detail which could help in a trade. He still has a ways to go, 10 weeks about, to get his 5 years of service.
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Post by Oregon Norm on May 19, 2015 10:05:03 GMT -5
OK, we can do some financial planning here. He doesn't have to pay down Craig's salary. That's because the Sox have a replacement, Castillo, who can do that if he generates 2.5 WAR. Or should Kelly be dinged for that on general principles? All he has to do is generate the WAR to pay his own salary off. We won't even give him credit for the cost of a Lackey replacement in the coming years, whatever that would be. I'm not talking about evaluating Kelly, I'm talking about evaluating the trade with the Cardinals. We traded Lackey for Kelly and Craig, not for Kelly and Castillo. So let me play devil's advocate here for the sake of the discussion. Let's put aside the probability that Kelly can make the value of the trade simply by being league average. Evaluating the trade in isolation rubs me the wrong way. When I lived in Vegas as a student, the casinos would lure customers in with cheap meals so that they could get them to the tables. Invariably, you'd have to walk through banks of slot machines and gaming tables to get to the restaurants. Lots of people would get pulled aside before they would ever make it to the food. The casino layout is still the same, but the rules of the game have changed. When the bean-counters showed up in the 70s, each unit was expected to pay for itself. While I understand the logic of that, the casino is one entity. It's not as if there wasn't a profit being made prior to that time, not at all. So what if the team looks at the larger picture? The ability to get a quality starter for one year of Lackey, and a cratered Craig, looks like that casino with the $1.25 all-you-can-eat buffet as a loss leader so you can get to the real stakes. The team had to be looking at the bigger picture, given the hedging options they seem to favor. I think they really wanted Kelly and Craig was the price they were willing to pay. The value of the money he was owed is certainly a factor, but the color of that money changes dramatically given the fact he still had options and that his salary could be wiped off the ML books if his performance remained in the tank and he were outrighted, now a done deal. To my mind, it's not that they don't care about the money, but the risk of that money limiting the options at the ML level are greatly diminished. And that's before we see what happens with Craig from here on out. If we're going to evaluate that trade for the risk potential he offered, that calculation becomes sticky very fast given the above considerations. The risk models would have to have quite a few probabilities. All of that informs the notion of Kelly's value. Any takers?
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Post by Chris Hatfield on May 19, 2015 10:09:02 GMT -5
I do not believe that anyone has noted: Craig was waived and outrighted before he had spent 20 days on option. So he does not burn an option and, at this point, goes into 2016 with 2 options remaining. A trivial detail which could help in a trade. He still has a ways to go, 10 weeks about, to get his 5 years of service. I guess? I really don't think there's any value there, which is why nobody has mentioned it. Who's going to want to trade for a guy that they're planning on optioning to Triple-A in a season in which he'll make $11 million? Is that really going to matter?
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Post by brianthetaoist on May 19, 2015 10:09:37 GMT -5
I agree with this, and apologize if I obfuscated this point in an attempt to be concise. My philosophy is this: using solely hindsight to judge a front office in small samples is usually a bad idea, because the nature of being a GM is that sometimes a good process leads to a bad result (for an extreme example, see Ryan Westmoreland). But we shouldn't ignore outcomes, either, and over a large enough sample, a good GM should have more good moves than bad moves. This one, unfortunately, looks like it falls into the "bad move" bucket. Nah, wasn't responding directly to you, just about the conversation in general ... and I agree with you on outcomes, but I'm not sure this yet falls into the "bad move" bucket. I didn't really like the trade at the time, felt like Lackey could've brought more in a trade, but I'm actually bit warmer on the trade now than I was, mostly because Kelly has a lot more value than I thought at the time. There are a couple different points to be made ... First, $ per WAR analysis is a little too rigid for me. I think a win is worth more to the Red Sox than most teams (probably more than anyone but perhaps the Yankees) due to the size of their income and the loss they take when they lose. So a straight WAR/$ analysis is going to underrate the advantage of a win and overrate the downside of a sunk cost. This means that Kelly's wins are underrated and Craig's contract is relatively overrated. Additionally, Craig's money not going toward the CBT calculations downgrades the importance of it even further. Not quite to irrelevance (I mean, it's still money), but certainly making it quite a bit less important than a straight value calculation would give it credit for. It's only important to me in how much it limits the Sox in making other moves, and I'm not convinced it's all that bit a limitation. So, really, you're talking about Kelly versus Lackey, with a relatively smaller downgrade to factor in with Craig. It's not clear to me yet that Lackey's value this year will offset [Kelly's for the next 4] minus [whatever a proper valuation of the opportunity costs of Craig's money].
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Post by jmei on May 19, 2015 10:34:44 GMT -5
FYI, Alex Speier writes the following in his newsletter today, which I believe is the right answer re: Craig's ability to opt for free agency while not on the 40-man roster:
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Post by mgoetze on May 19, 2015 10:40:03 GMT -5
I, uh, sorry Norm, your non-quantitative analysis just doesn't work for me. I mean, you could write the same thing if Craig were owed $50 million, or even $200 million. "Hey, at least it doesn't count versus the luxury tax." There's got to be a price point at which the deal is bad, and to find that price point you're going to have to look at more numbers than the cost of a buffet in Vegas.
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Post by jmei on May 19, 2015 10:41:11 GMT -5
I think we can agree on the following: 1) If Lackey was going to play for the Red Sox on the league minimum contract this season, the trade is abysmal 2) If Lackey wasn't going to play for the Red Sox on the league minimum this season, then the trade is more defensible, but still not great. 3) We don't know for certain whether or not he was going to play for the league minimum contract. There were rumors at the time that he wouldn't do it, and let's call a spade a spade here - he said that he didn't know if he'd have played for the league minimum for the Sox because he hadn't thought that far ahead... if you were definitely going to do so, wouldn't you say "yes of course I would've" or something? The fact that it was something he had to think about, at least, suggests that it's a fair thing to ask oneself, particularly given what the Red Sox took for him. Sure, there was a risk that he wouldn't have played for the Red Sox this year, and even with hindsight, there's some uncertainty involved with the counterfactual scenario of what Lackey would have done had he not been traded. But I've argued above that it's a pretty minor risk, and I've still yet to really read a convincing argument for why he was or would have been significantly unhappier pitching with the Red Sox for the minimum as compared to pitching for the Cardinals for the minimum (which, by all accounts, is the case right now).
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Post by jmei on May 19, 2015 10:44:38 GMT -5
I've been a pretty big critic of this trade since the beginning, but if the Red Sox felt they needed to move Lackey, and this was the best offer? I dunno. Lackey would also have gained 10-5 rights following the season, so the team would've had less leverage in trading him. There were a lot of considerations going on here. That's begging the question, though. They reportedly insisted on major league talent, which presumably pushed some teams out of the running, and less than a year after the trade, one of the two major leaguers they received in return looks like a significant net negative. There's obviously still a lot of uncertainty involved, perhaps enough that the criticism can't be too strongly-worded, but, as stevedillard and other suggest above, I believe there's a strong possibility that the front office could have traded Lackey for a prospect-based package (or even another major-leaguer-based package) that we would be happier with looking back on it.
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Post by mgoetze on May 19, 2015 10:47:45 GMT -5
First, $ per WAR analysis is a little too rigid for me. I think a win is worth more to the Red Sox than most teams (probably more than anyone but perhaps the Yankees) due to the size of their income and the loss they take when they lose. So a straight WAR/$ analysis is going to underrate the advantage of a win and overrate the downside of a sunk cost. This means that Kelly's wins are underrated and Craig's contract is relatively overrated. Be careful, that sword you're wielding there is sharp on both edges. If we're not going for linear $/WAR then I can just as well claim that a single 3-win season from Lackey is more valuable than four 2-win seasons from Kelly, because roster spots are limited and it's easier to pick up another 2-win pitcher in free agency than it is to pick up a 3-win pitcher.
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Post by jmei on May 19, 2015 10:49:55 GMT -5
So what if the team looks at the larger picture? The ability to get a quality starter for one year of Lackey, and a cratered Craig, looks like that casino with the $1.25 all-you-can-eat buffet as a loss leader so you can get to the real stakes. The team had to be looking at the bigger picture, given the hedging options they seem to favor. I think they really wanted Kelly and Craig was the price they were willing to pay. The value of the money he was owed is certainly a factor, but the color of that money changes dramatically given the fact he still had options and that his salary could be wiped off the ML books if his performance remained in the tank and he were outrighted, now a done deal. To my mind, it's not that they don't care about the money, but the risk of that money limiting the options at the ML level are greatly diminished. And that's before we see what happens with Craig from here on out. Honest question: do you think the front office, circa August 2014, believed Craig and his contract were a net negative? If so, and they still did the deal because they thought Kelly had significant unrealized potential, then sure, I could buy the above. If not (and I suspect this is the case in reality-- if I had more time, I'd look up some of the front office quotes from the period, as I vaguely remember them saying that they expected a big bounce-back from Craig and targeted him specifically), then their evaluation of Craig looks like it was wrong, and they have to own that mistake.
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Post by Oregon Norm on May 19, 2015 10:55:37 GMT -5
I, uh, sorry Norm, your non-quantitative analysis just doesn't work for me. I mean, you could write the same thing if Craig were owed $50 million, or even $200 million. "Hey, at least it doesn't count versus the luxury tax." There's got to be a price point at which the deal is bad, and to find that price point you're going to have to look at more numbers than the cost of a buffet in Vegas. But he's not owed either of those, not even close. Again, you can certainly try to calculate the risk in his value and what he's owed, factor in his options, and the value of that money at the ML level versus the MiLB level, as well as the team's outfield hedges. Please, give it a go. I'll check the model for accuracy once you've got it in the can.
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Post by jmei on May 19, 2015 10:58:02 GMT -5
First, $ per WAR analysis is a little too rigid for me. I think a win is worth more to the Red Sox than most teams (probably more than anyone but perhaps the Yankees) due to the size of their income and the loss they take when they lose. So a straight WAR/$ analysis is going to underrate the advantage of a win and overrate the downside of a sunk cost. This means that Kelly's wins are underrated and Craig's contract is relatively overrated. Be careful, that sword you're wielding there is sharp on both edges. If we're not going for linear $/WAR then I can just as well claim that a single 3-win season from Lackey is more valuable than four 2-win seasons from Kelly, because roster spots are limited and it's easier to pick up another 2-win pitcher in free agency than it is to pick up a 3-win pitcher. Yeah, this argument cuts against the pro-front office argument. This is related to the discount rate argument I made earlier-- a team like the Red Sox generally prefers to maximize its wins in the near-term, as it intends to compete just about every year. This is the mindset that justifies deals like Masterson for V. Martinez, Iglesias for Peavy, RDLR/Webster for Miley, etc. even though, from a strict $/WAR perspective, you're giving up more than you get back. I'm willing to buy that this is a thing big-market teams should prioritize. But here, the Red Sox did the opposite-- they gave up the piece that projects to accumulate more surplus value in 2015 in return for the pieces that project to provide more long-term value.
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Post by brianthetaoist on May 19, 2015 11:01:36 GMT -5
First, $ per WAR analysis is a little too rigid for me. I think a win is worth more to the Red Sox than most teams (probably more than anyone but perhaps the Yankees) due to the size of their income and the loss they take when they lose. So a straight WAR/$ analysis is going to underrate the advantage of a win and overrate the downside of a sunk cost. This means that Kelly's wins are underrated and Craig's contract is relatively overrated. Be careful, that sword you're wielding there is sharp on both edges. If we're not going for linear $/WAR then I can just as well claim that a single 3-win season from Lackey is more valuable than four 2-win seasons from Kelly, because roster spots are limited and it's easier to pick up another 2-win pitcher in free agency than it is to pick up a 3-win pitcher. Nah, that's not really what I mean (although I actually think your point has merit) ... I'm saying that the $/WAR analysis should include a higher $ figure per WAR for the Sox than it would in the general market because a win is more valuable to the Sox than other teams because of their economic situation. That has the effect of downgrading the relative importance of the sunk costs of Craig's contract.
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Post by ethanbein on May 19, 2015 11:16:10 GMT -5
Be careful, that sword you're wielding there is sharp on both edges. If we're not going for linear $/WAR then I can just as well claim that a single 3-win season from Lackey is more valuable than four 2-win seasons from Kelly, because roster spots are limited and it's easier to pick up another 2-win pitcher in free agency than it is to pick up a 3-win pitcher. Nah, that's not really what I mean (although I actually think your point has merit) ... I'm saying that the $/WAR analysis should include a higher $ figure per WAR for the Sox than it would in the general market because a win is more valuable to the Sox than other teams because of their economic situation. That has the effect of downgrading the relative importance of the sunk costs of Craig's contract. $/WAR is a price in the market. Just because the Red Sox might be willing to pay 11 million or something per WAR because of the Boston media market doesn't mean they have to, and if they do, they're losing out on money they could be spending more wisely elsewhere in the market.
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Post by mgoetze on May 19, 2015 11:19:23 GMT -5
But he's not owed either of those, not even close. No? Half of Craig's 2014 salary, plus his 2015 to 2017 salary, plus his 2018 option buyout is $27.9m. Additionally, it was reported at the time of the trade that cash also changed hands to balance out the 2014 salaries. Lackey was making about $15m and Craig and Kelly about $2m in 2014, so the Red Sox probably sent along another $4m or so. $32m is close enough to $50m that it certainly needn't change your analysis which doesn't mention salary numbers at all. Oh, so I do all the work while you lean back and think up strange analogies, I get it now. The key variable we don't know is how willing the Red Sox are to go above the Luxury Tax threshold in the future (not to mention what's going to happen with that in the next CBA). If we assume, for instance, that they're willing to go over for 2 years in a row but not 3, then it would be fair to apply a 16% markup (average of 0%, 17.5% and 30%) to the cost of money on the major league payroll, and discount the $26m owed Craig from 2015 onwards to about $22.5m of major league salary equivalent. This isn't going to change the analysis much.
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Post by brianthetaoist on May 19, 2015 11:35:09 GMT -5
I'm not talking about evaluating Kelly, I'm talking about evaluating the trade with the Cardinals. We traded Lackey for Kelly and Craig, not for Kelly and Castillo. So let me play devil's advocate here for the sake of the discussion. Let's put aside the probability that Kelly can make the value of the trade simply by being league average. Evaluating the trade in isolation rubs me the wrong way. When I lived in Vegas as a student, the casinos would lure customers in with cheap meals so that they could get them to the tables. Invariably, you'd have to walk through banks of slot machines and gaming tables to get to the restaurants. Lots of people would get pulled aside before they would ever make it to the food. The casino layout is still the same, but the rules of the game have changed. When the bean-counters showed up in the 70s, each unit was expected to pay for itself. While I understand the logic of that, the casino is one entity. It's not as if there wasn't a profit being made prior to that time, not at all. So what if the team looks at the larger picture? The ability to get a quality starter for one year of Lackey, and a cratered Craig, looks like that casino with the $1.25 all-you-can-eat buffet as a loss leader so you can get to the real stakes. The team had to be looking at the bigger picture, given the hedging options they seem to favor. I think they really wanted Kelly and Craig was the price they were willing to pay. The value of the money he was owed is certainly a factor, but the color of that money changes dramatically given the fact he still had options and that his salary could be wiped off the ML books if his performance remained in the tank and he were outrighted, now a done deal. To my mind, it's not that they don't care about the money, but the risk of that money limiting the options at the ML level are greatly diminished. And that's before we see what happens with Craig from here on out. If we're going to evaluate that trade for the risk potential he offered, that calculation becomes sticky very fast given the above considerations. The risk models would have to have quite a few probabilities. All of that informs the notion of Kelly's value. Any takers? Problem with this analysis is that an effective loss leader is a cost that indirectly leads to profits in other areas (or at a later date). Cheap food in casinos may well lead to higher profits on the games. Craig's cost doesn't act that way; it's just a loss.
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Post by brianthetaoist on May 19, 2015 11:42:10 GMT -5
Be careful, that sword you're wielding there is sharp on both edges. If we're not going for linear $/WAR then I can just as well claim that a single 3-win season from Lackey is more valuable than four 2-win seasons from Kelly, because roster spots are limited and it's easier to pick up another 2-win pitcher in free agency than it is to pick up a 3-win pitcher. Yeah, this argument cuts against the pro-front office argument. This is related to the discount rate argument I made earlier-- a team like the Red Sox generally prefers to maximize its wins in the near-term, as it intends to compete just about every year. This is the mindset that justifies deals like Masterson for V. Martinez, Iglesias for Peavy, RDLR/Webster for Miley, etc. even though, from a strict $/WAR perspective, you're giving up more than you get back. I'm willing to buy that this is a thing big-market teams should prioritize. But here, the Red Sox did the opposite-- they gave up the piece that projects to accumulate more surplus value in 2015 in return for the pieces that project to provide more long-term value. Yeah, and I'm generally sympathetic to this argument; it's why I was skeptical about the trade to begin with. But I've softened because I think the difference between Lackey and Kelly may not be as big as I thought this year. Or it may be! We'll have to see ... but the main factors in the success of this trade for me are Kelly this year vs Lackey this year, weighed against Kelly's subsequent years vs the cost of acquiring those results in other ways. I just think Craig's sunk cost isn't all that important a factor in the whole thing. Worth a shot, didn't work out, and he managed to be SO bad that they cleared his costs off the CBT calculations.
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Post by Chris Hatfield on May 19, 2015 12:00:44 GMT -5
I think we can agree on the following: 1) If Lackey was going to play for the Red Sox on the league minimum contract this season, the trade is abysmal 2) If Lackey wasn't going to play for the Red Sox on the league minimum this season, then the trade is more defensible, but still not great. 3) We don't know for certain whether or not he was going to play for the league minimum contract. There were rumors at the time that he wouldn't do it, and let's call a spade a spade here - he said that he didn't know if he'd have played for the league minimum for the Sox because he hadn't thought that far ahead... if you were definitely going to do so, wouldn't you say "yes of course I would've" or something? The fact that it was something he had to think about, at least, suggests that it's a fair thing to ask oneself, particularly given what the Red Sox took for him. Sure, there was a risk that he wouldn't have played for the Red Sox this year, and even with hindsight, there's some uncertainty involved with the counterfactual scenario of what Lackey would have done had he not been traded. But I've argued above that it's a pretty minor risk, and I've still yet to really read a convincing argument for why he was or would have been significantly unhappier pitching with the Red Sox for the minimum as compared to pitching for the Cardinals for the minimum (which, by all accounts, is the case right now). What, in your post, is a disagreement with anything I wrote?
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Post by mgoetze on May 19, 2015 12:03:57 GMT -5
What, in your post, is a disagreement with anything I wrote? What jmei is saying is... ...but it's pretty damn unlikely that he wouldn't have.
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Post by Chris Hatfield on May 19, 2015 12:13:17 GMT -5
OK, I guess that's true in hindsight, but I'm just trying to remember - we'd been hearing that he might not play for the minimum for a while, no? It just seems really weird for that to have been floated out there, and then just be completely false.
Perhaps the better #3 would've been that we don't know for certain whether the Red Sox thought he would play for the league minimum, or if he would be a problem if he did. You can evaluate and judge based on their being off on that, but at least you can see why they'd be willing to take what they did.
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Post by gregblossersbelly on May 19, 2015 12:19:46 GMT -5
It's BC being outsmarted by another GM........AGAIN
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Post by jimed14 on May 19, 2015 12:28:56 GMT -5
Nah, that's not really what I mean (although I actually think your point has merit) ... I'm saying that the $/WAR analysis should include a higher $ figure per WAR for the Sox than it would in the general market because a win is more valuable to the Sox than other teams because of their economic situation. That has the effect of downgrading the relative importance of the sunk costs of Craig's contract. $/WAR is a price in the market. Just because the Red Sox might be willing to pay 11 million or something per WAR because of the Boston media market doesn't mean they have to, and if they do, they're losing out on money they could be spending more wisely elsewhere in the market. That is true only when the Red Sox indicate that they have an overall spending limit, which they have not indicated to this point.
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